Slashdot Mirror

Also check Philip Greenspun's (of ArsDigita fame) photo.net which is a possibly the best (and original) one-stop photography resource on the net.
The tutorials are fantastic, and the community is incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, you honestly won't find more pros and experts in one place.

Latest digital reviews include the Minolta Dimage 5, the Canon EOS D60 (I so want one of these! Or an EOS-1D if I won the lottery), and the Nikon D100, so it proves that they're very up-to-date.

Check it out!

What about the web? Dynamic websites (y'know, like Slashdot) are a big part of IT today, certainly the fastest growing part over the last few years. (And I, for one, don't think B-to-B web services are going to take over anytime soon, so don't waste too much time on not-yet technology.)

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing is a great overview of how to do dynamic websites. Philip Greenspun champions his chosen tools (Unix, AOLserver, TCL, Oracle) but he mentions alternatives and gives reasons for his choices. One of the benefits of his personal style is that he tells you enough about himself and his projects so you understand the context of his technological choices.

Greenspun doesn't attempt encyclopedic coverage of each technology. Instead, he goes into enough technical depth (including illustrative code) so you can see what needs to be done, using whatever tools you choose, to accomplish the tasks required by dynamic websites. And he gives you perspective you need so you can make the right choices for your own projects.

What really sets this book apart is how entertaining it is. Greenspun is a very smart, very funny guy, with a lot of practical insight and a lot of color photos that cleverly liven up the pages. The book is free on the web, so take a look (don't skip the acknowledgements), but really, you'll want to own it.

Who remembers the DAT tax? Before doing digital audio on computers was made practical by mp3 and cd-r there was DAT. And the music industry clamped down hard to prevent it from becoming a consumer product. So they got a tax placed on DAT media and devices and had a chip implanted in every DAT device to prevent copying.

Thought it was relevant to this, but didn't think the slashdotters would let me do a feature ;)

Anyhoo, here's some reference links

The right way to tax dat by RMS

Phillip Greenspun comments and gave testimony before the Senate.

What happens to the money that the Library of Congress collects.

• Dsico - Love Will Freak Us (Missy E - Get ur Freak On/Joy Division - Love will Tear Us Apart)
• Dsico - Two Turntables are Ice (Ice T - Check Your Game/Beck - Where It's At)
• Grange Hill Grammar (Nelly - Country Grammar/Theme From Grange Hill)
• We Dont Give A Damn About Our Friends (Adina Howard - Freak Like Me/Gary Numan & Tubeway Army - Are Friends Electric?)
• I Wanna Dance With Numbers (Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance with Somebody/Kraftwerk - Numbers/Computer World)

I've done only very limited contract work and at that, it wasn't Open Source. I think it really depends on the client, as the people I was working with hired me specifically because they were a Windows firm and didn't want to bother themselves with some Unix stuff that came their way from an existing client. For them, of course, it would have been impossible. But I can speak in regard to how some companies would react in general.

If you're working with a firm that's more familiar with the a community or is part of a larger scientific community, it's another matter. Some firms view releasing open source software as almost a promotional effort and you might egg them to develop an "open source policy" to satify their concerns.

Board of director types have bazaar stigmas and FUD like "won't we have to support it," "won't it give away our business model," and so on. You can address those questions by suggested an OSS policy. The policy basically comes down to how and when they'll open source software. For example, they won't open source software that would be directly useful to their compeditors. When they do, putting the employee email addresses won't be allowed, as it will burden them with emails. Open Source projects shall be included on another website, etc etc etc.

But they will be more warm to a policy than simply deciding to open source things adhoc -- so if you give them a policy to address their concerns, you might have better luck.

And of course if your Philip Greenspun good, you can TELL them it'll be Open Source. :)

2 cents.

The guild is way off base here. Authors actually can make more money by using Amazon's associates program.

I recently co-authored the mod_perl Developer's Cookbook and we link to Amazon for our sales. I've also sold some of my collection through the Amazon marketplace, so I've seen both sides.

Amazon's commission structure is simply the best. We average about 10% of the purchase price on referals, plus 5% of anything else the customer buys in that session. So far these commissions are almost outpacing actual royalties from total sales.

There have been some used books available for sale, but those have not bothered me one bit. Buying used might save some money, but it is a less convenient option and most people still opt to buy new. (For example you cannot get a better shipping cost for multiple items.)

The Author's Guild should focus it's efforts on getting authors a bigger royalty in the first place, and stamping out the nasty liability clauses in most contracts these days. See this article by Philip Greenspun for why these contracts suck.

Favorite quote: Five percent of retail is fair if you abandon one erroneous assumption: that the publishing industry exists to compensate authors.

Same ideas as the linked article, just more in depth.

Still not the ideal (read the review) cellphone/portable, but at least it has different flaws.

Review by Philip Greenspun.

Maybe Microsoft will get it right.

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

...Phil was widely known to be a bastard ...

Well, I don't know the guy, but I've read a lot of what he has written (see here ). It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk. There's this story about how he paid MIT students their tuition money (for one class) back, out of his own pocket . Amounted to more than $2000, if my calculations were correct. How many people would do that? Also, he seemed genuinely devastated by the death of his dog. People who are that civilized are usually 'good' people in my experience.

Judging from his more recent comments on his Ask Phillip bulletin board, he's mellowed out considerably since ArsDigita's investors bought him out. Apparently he's decided that he has better things to do with the rest of his life than complain about the sorry state of the computer industry.

See also this thread on OpenACS bboards for more info, and also Philip Greenspun's comments

Twas a good thing - just remember, however greedy you get, never succomb to the temptation of VC

This just reminds me of the differences in thought between EE and CS...

HDL's in java or C? HEH... What's next? x86 assembler implemented in java? ( pun :-P )

Maybe you should take a look here http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference- explained

Damn CS's :-P

of this humor. (Scroll down and read the sociology part).

Please read this

If you found the text from the original post funny you might want to check out the Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists by Philip Greenspun.

Dejan
www.jelovic.com

If you found the text from the original post funny you might want to check out the Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists by Philip Greenspun.

Dejan
www.jelovic.com

Ok, you know about this system, and you know what goes into building a cave, right?:

1. Several boxen
2. This software
3. Several projectors
4. A tracking system
5. 3D shutter glasses

All of which can be expensive. If you aren't thinking. If you aren't hacking.

Ok, you have the boxes and the software - that part is easy, and relatively cheap. But hey, six boxes can be expensive, especially when you are dropping good video cards into each. So what to do?

Use three boxes instead. Each box should have a dual head card. Then build a three wall cave instead. Such a configuration can be done either as a front view and two sides, or "staring at a corner", that is, using two adjacent sides and the ceiling for the projection surfaces. The other two sides can be rigged with black velvet curtains to block light.

Now, you need projectors. As we all know, such projectors aren't cheap - but they are coming down in price. If you can pick up six projectors (for stereo - two per wall) cheaply, more power to you. However, most of us won't be that lucky. So, what to do?

Build your own projectors!

This site was spun off, crazy as it sounds, from the 100 Inch TV list on the same server. The group is focusing on building video projectors using cheap and easy to get LCD TVs, etc. Robin Holland also wrote a VR Book that detailed such a projector (see my VR site for more details on that book) back in 1996 (as well as the 100 inch TV projector, but that was done by others before him and all this long ago, called the Warper for the AcidWarp program).

Such projectors should prove not too difficult to build, and cheaply - but won't be high-res or anything - but they will be usable! I have a Fujix P-401 that is similar in design that is watchable, so I know what it would look like. If you build six of the projectors, you can use them with shutter glasses for stereo...

So, you need shutter glasses! Where to get 'em cheaply? Try Ebay! Look at this link for the systems currently on auction. There are a ton! But how to get 3D with your cheap LCD projectors (or even normal projectors)? Well, buy a pair of LCD 3D glasses for yourself, then a pair for every two projectors! Each pair will have two shutter LCD light valves - pull those out of the glasses, and place in front of each projector's output, and sync those with the glasses on the user. You may need to add fans to blow across these shutters to keep them from being overheated by the projector light source. Instant cheap 3D (but it may give you a headache after extended use)...!

So, now you need tracking. This is the really tough part - but it is possible to build this yourself. If you look at my site, you will notice that in Issue 2 of Cheap VR, I tell how to build a 3D magnetic tracker. Well, I have news for you: I have found someone who has done it, independently of my article (that is, he didn't know about my site or articles):

Juan's Homemade Magnetic Tracker

He has published a Circuit Cellar article on the tracker last August (2001) - detailing the construction and such. I was able to get a copy from him, and he says he plans on putting the article on his site for download. It looks like he is having traffic quota issues on part of the notes currently, but the PDF file will tell you a lot, and explains the math and theory behind it all (he covers a lot of things I didn't think of). Anyhow, notice in the pictures and movies that his hand is being moved inside a cube structure? That cube is the 3D tracker transmitter, similar in scope to what I wrote a long time ago. Anyhow - he has told me he is planning on building a 6 foot per side cube, to allow the tracker to track a user inside the cube. Check this: That cube structure can be your frame for the CAVE.

Build a cube of sufficient size (6 foot per side or larger), add the coils, then add the projection screens (Want a cheap back projection screen? Use white-plastic painter's dropdown "cloths", or use clear plastic "cloths", then frost them with glass frosting paint. Finally, stretch the plastic on the frames). Put the edges right against each other, so that the "seams" between the screens are minimized. Use the homebrew projectors to project against them (for the dual projection system, place the projectors as close as possible together - there will be some keystoning, but hopefully not too much to cause major issues).

There you have - a quick and easy CAVE system. Now, mind you, this won't be a simple construction project - not at all. Main reason is size, because you will need a room larger than the "inside" room you are building for the CAVE. But I can see this being done in a spare bedroom, or maybe a garage, given enough ingenuity.

So, now that you have an idea - someone try it out (hell, I would if I had the room) - and email me and let me know how it works...

... minimal. "Horrible" DVD player software, crashing Windows 98, unreliable input devices.

If the article describes the general case, it is no wonder these things did not catch on.

http://www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-393.HTML

The biggest problem about getting science fiction applied in what is laughingly called 'the real world' is the old Catch-22. It is best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke's explanation of why he is not rather better off than he actually is. When he first had the idea of the communications satellite, he tried to get it patented. 'Come, come, Mr Clarke,' said the people at the Patent Office. 'We're a serious outfit, we haven't got time to waste on fantastic ideas like this.' Years later, when the first satellite (with which Arthur was actively involved) actually went up, and the nations were queuing to get their own satellites up, Arthur went back to the Patent Office. 'But, Mr Clarke,' they said, 'the satellite already exists. You should have come to us earlier.'

Typical Bureaucratic bungling.

and there is more:

The very first paper describing the very first constellation, consisting of three satellites in geostationary orbit. Allegedly the only accurate science-fiction prediction ever. Authored by the famous Arthur C. Clarke, before the space race, before Sputnik 1, and before Arthur C. Clarke became a famous author. (There's a mirror of the paper. And now we call it the Clarke orbit, and you can simulate the original proposal.

This Page also discusses the legal issues because at the time Clarke wrote his paper, there was no way to get a satellite into orbit to begin with.

Before IBM told them to take a powder, few people knew about M$. IBM is the company that set the architecture because IBM is the company that people knew and trusted. The Bill Gates influence on that company was nothing but negative, but he leveraged his association with them to grow. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, M$ will return from where they came as IBM focuses on being a computer and equipment maker.

As you can never construct the truth from untrusted sources and trying is a waste of effort, let me point you to some useful sites:
Bill Gates Howto
Bill Gates wealth
Prediction of M$ hardware "openness"

i know, i know, rtfm, but does apache 2.x still serve pages by forking a new process (i know, it preforks, blah blah, still you end up with dozens of processes)? until apache is a multithreaded server like AOLServer (don't laugh, it's open source and very, very good) or even a non-blocking IO server like thttpd it is just unusable for truly scalable or database-centric stuff. i love all the mods for apache, and would love the apache API to evolve to a single process, advanced server instead of the 'patchy' mess on top of NCSA it started as.

for background on why things like non-blocking IO or multithreaded instead of forking is good, check out thttpd's section on non-blocking io or Philip Greenspun's own Introduction to AOLServer, part 1.

-sam

There's a good article here called "Why Not MySQL?" by Ben Adida [mailto], part of the OpenACS Project [openacs.org], on why MySQL wasn't the right choice for OpenACS (at the time). It's quite out of date (and is recognised as such by the author), but still worth a read, and there many interesting submitted comments. Take a look at some decent free RDBMS alternatives such as Firebird (open-source free Interbase) or PostgreSQL while you're at it. Oh, and there's plenty more dicussion on MySQL in a previous Slashdot article here.

Stef

If Bill Gates wants me to document his life, he can pay me. But while we negotiate my fee, have a read of this.

I was curious and found a link to plans. Assume it is the same type of design. I'll stick with my projector.

This is esentially the same idea as a school projector. The idea works but TVs don't put out enough light to make a very briliant picture. So you can only watch at night. You also still need a flat white screen to project your image onto. Essentially this is your poor man's big screen. It will never rival a real big screen TV but it will be cool to impress your frineds or at least for a fun physics project on light. Here's a link that I found that contains instructions as well as comments. http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg. tcl?msg_id=0038A5

Well, Perl is a general programming language, not just a web development languge, so it will take you further. You never know when you might want to get out of web development...or get forcibly removed from it (Dot.Com.Crash).

Also, since it excels at text handling (and the most important stuff on a web site is text...Content is King), it's quite good for web development.

If you find yourself having to be the Web Developer/Sysadmin/Web Server Maintainer/Etc., the sysadmining and general "Swiss Army Chain Saw" nature of the language can help you get a lot of things done quickly and efficiently. If you end up being "only" the Web Developer, well, it never hurts to have the flexibility to do more, as the recent change in the Hi-Tech job market has shown. Perl can also let you do more as a web developer. Philip Greenspun has a review of "Mastering Regular Expressions" on Amazon where he talks about how Perl and Regular Expresions helped him save a client $10K by changing a ton of .html files in an automated fashion.

That sort of thing is what causes people to emphsize Perl for web development. It lets you do more with less. Not to mention all the modules out there waiting to be put to work for you...

Anyway, just my $.0.0002 Benjamin,

You could try here but unfortunately the original article at Buzzflash.com can no longer be found, nor can the two articles in Yahoo and the Guardian. Both, rather conveniently, have expired, but when I found this I can verify that the link to the Guardian worked and it is quite genuine. You can also find it in an archive here.

You won't be hearing much of this on CNN, I can imagine. It's all but disappeared from the internet, and from the public memory...

On the contrary, AOLServer is really quite good. It's tight binding with Tcl makes it possible to pull of some incredibly elegant things in just a few short lines of code. If you want to see some good examples of AOLServer (which is OSS, by the way) in use, check out photo.net, arsdigita.com, or anything else done by Philip Greenspun/ArsDigita. He swears by it, and for good reason. The original poster's page doesn't do it much (any?) justice.

--

The idea of using kites for heavy lifting and construction isn't new--Chinese legends talk about lifting huge blocks to the top of cliffs to build castles (a brief search turned up this site)--but I doubt the Egyptians did it. The origin of the kite is generally thought to have been in China and Malaysia circa 200 BCE, long after the bulk of Egytian construction. Still a cool idea!

You could try this one which provides some interesting material. One thing about professional advice: it's been shown time and time again that professional fund managers, advisors, brokers and the like are collectively underperformers. You can almost always get better returns off index linked funds, or, for that matter, monkys with a dartboard.

That
would
be
rediculous
!


-Spackler

--

They already did. Even in Canada

The article seems to go off on a rant about AOL with Netscape, but neglects to mention that they purchased NaviSoft and then allowed NaviServer to be revamped as an open-source package. I have been using AOLServer with Oracle for a couple of years, and am totally in love with it. If I remember right, there was a request by Philip Greenspun of MIT to AOL to release AOLServer as open source, and they said agreed to it.

If it weren't for the regulation of society through the mechanism of slavery, and hence the suppression of the free market, we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years ago.

200 BC: Alexandria, Egypt: A cultured city with a population of 500,000, the world's first lighthouse, university, library with 500,000 manuscripts/books, multi-decked shipping, theatres, temples with automatic sliding doors, and engineers working with a simple steam engine. From: Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions.

In which case we would be about where we are now in high-tech back in AD 200. By AD

230 Billus Gaticus and Laurence of Ellisonius would be multi-trillionaires, clone many offspring, build a sanctuary in space, and then des troy the planet, so they can make version 3.1 the way it was supposed to be, and then encode their plan in DNA, enslave their new creations, and create a secret society so the information isn't lost.

Who needs money when you can have a planet of slaves?

If it weren't for the regulation of society through the mechanism of slavery, and hence the suppression of the free market, we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years ago.

200 BC: Alexandria, Egypt: A cultured city with a population of 500,000, the world's first lighthouse, university, library with 500,000 manuscripts/books, multi-decked shipping, theatres, temples with automatic sliding doors, and engineers working with a simple steam engine. From: Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions.

In which case we would be about where we are now in high-tech back in AD 200. By AD

230 Billus Gaticus and Laurence of Ellisonius would be multi-trillionaires, clone many offspring, build a sanctuary in space, and then des troy the planet, so they can make version 3.1 the way it was supposed to be, and then encode their plan in DNA, enslave their new creations, and create a secret society so the information isn't lost.

Who needs money when you can have a planet of slaves?

Good luck with your troubles.

I seem to remember him having a rant on there about the diminishing value of a graduate+ education, but I can't seem to find it now, and the content I'm thinking of seems to have been folded into the page above. *shrug*

I seem to remember him having a rant on there about the diminishing value of a graduate+ education, but I can't seem to find it now, and the content I'm thinking of seems to have been folded into the page above. *shrug*

There has been quite a flap lately over teachers wanting to restrict the information disseminated in their courses, to make everything proprietary and closed, but there's a fundamental tie between educational ideals and the free flow of information that can and should be exploited to improve the world's access to knowledge. To the extent that MIT's curriculum is distinctive and may want to influence the curriculums of other schools, the best way to make the world see how good your ideas are is a very old idea- make them public and subject them to peer review. If your ideas are effective, they'll be widely adopted. I think MIT is doing something very smart- they want people to see why they have a reputation for technical excellence.

I've written a small article on how we've refined our software engineering for Internet applications course over the years. It includes some discussion of what has been effective about ArsDigita University. See http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/teaching-soft ware-engineering (still in draft form so please email if you have comments/corrections).

• this year ADU is exclusively on-campus. We are taught in person, have TAs stationed in the same room as us, etc. Materials have been made available online, to some extent, to benefit people capable of doing something constructive with their time, but without the resources, flexibility, or eligibility to attend a quality CS program.
• ADU is not focused on web scripting and databases. There is one course explicitly on programming for the web (yes this will involve using a scripting language). Personally, I plan to use the popular LAMP combo that month, whereas Philip has in the past used AOL server and Oracle and TCL. To the extent that the program is more focused on the Web than other programs, there is good reason, both for the direction computing is going and because of the sorts of goals the students here have. This is not to say that courses such as discrete math, algorithms, OOP, theory of computation, and computer hardware aren't a part of the curriculum.
• suggesting that ADU might be a mill for big companies desiring drones for cubicle farms is really stupid. Hello, they're not even funding us. Not to mention that a review of the student body would clear up any idea that ADU students are the sort that would resign themselves to such a pathetic fate.
• ADU was never intended to be a breeding grounds for arsDigita employees. While this is less obvious, it is consistent with the stated mission of this place, with Philip's comments in interviews, and, hey, there is no evidence to the contrary, but don't let that stop you.
• obviously a 1 year program cannot be everything that a 4+ year program can be, but people should keep in mind that this is an intensive program. The 12 hour a day, 6 day a week desciption is accurate. The resources available, the interaction between students, these sorts of things result in the time being used much more effectively than is typical in the programs this is being held up against. The learning taking place here, whatever the limit, is not at a dumbed down/non-interactive level. This should be obvious to anyone who looks at the curriculum and is familiar with what it covers.
• We did not lose funding because Microsoft pulled some strings. That is my favorite. Acutally Microsoft is sending us 40 Win2K machines next week.
• yes, we run Linux.

• Tuition-free MIT by Philip Greenspun
• the ADU curriculum and faculty | more
• students | more | more
• press
• why apply (google cache)
• class catalog (google cache)
• do your own research

It was a feeder for Phil Greenspun's web incubators. I guess he was the main funder and these businesses aren't as robust as last year.

I got US$20/page for something I wrote back in '96. I was dumb (well, naive) and poor back then, and I was willing to listen to the acquisitions editor when he told me that "some of [his] better authors write 4 chapters a week!" That sounded pretty good to me... US$2400 a week, maybe. Wow!

I'm not sure who these people are that can do that (hacks? machines? hack-machines?), but it's sure as hell not me. I try to budget 3 hours or so per _page_ right now, if I want for there to be any quality in it at all. Even that, that's probably not even fully-allocated time. It doesn't include:

• interacting with the editor/publisher in the first place
• brainstorming
• dedicated research
• follow-up after you've submitted your rough to the editor/publisher
• probably a bazillion other things I'm forgetting about right now (maybe I'd blocked those things out of my memory for the pain involved...)

The next book project I did, I was offered it at US$20/page again (enough though it was 2.5 years later, the market had changed, I had more experience, etc.). I asked for US$25/page, and was given it immediately. (Which can only make you wonder what the "true upper limit" on such a thing is.) Still, the money was garbage for the work I had to put into it.

Even then, don't just look at the money. The "standard contract" for a book that most tech publishers give you is... well, to call it one-sided doesn't even begin to describe it. :-) If you hope to have any kind of personal involvement or control over the project or what happens to it after publication, you're likely in for quite an uphill battle.

Love him or hate him, Philip Greenspun has some interesting things to say about the publishing business for tech books. To a greater or lesser degree, I agree with him. Check it out... http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.h tml

Does all this mean that I won't write again? No way! I love writing, and I keep going back to it time and time again. I might even be getting better at it over the years, and that puts me in a better position to negotiate contracts, pitch ideas, plan the book the way that I want the book to be, etc. It's hard work, and there's a lot of BS involved, and the pay isn't great, but it can be incredibly gratifying to do.

Please feel free to mail me if you'd like to talk any more about this.

Cheers,
Richard

Take a driving tour throughout the US this summer. (Get some ideas from Philip Greenspun's travelogues). There's a lot more to the US (good and bad -- for the latter, be sure to visit where I live: Los Angeles) than Bangor.

My brother in law is currently in Spain, having travelled through most of Europe over the past year. If he decried the culture of Europe based on his initial impressions of Malaga, would you complain a bit? Sure.

There are less than a dozen schools offering tech training in photonics in North America, and not a lot in the rest of the world - see here for some of them.

Anyhow, no workers, no broadband.

This patent is incredibly broad, covering any URL which identifies the document to be delivered, the intended recipient, and "other parameters". Everyone who handled user login using querystring data (remember the good ol' days before cookies?) has prior art on this. I've got sites dating back to '95 and '96 that do this, and I certainly got the idea from someone who came before.

Indeed. An interesting twist here is that a patent cannot be covered by prior art, or merely an obvious extension of prior art to a person of ordinary skill in the art. If "the art" here is authenticating users to a web server, the use of baroque URLs was quite well understood in the time before cookies became prevalent. Specifically, I think that ordinary people, like even me, could figure out how to do this after reading selections from Phil Greenspun's How to be a Web Whore Just Like Me which has been around on the net for, god, forever, and was published as Database backed web sites in 1997.

Open, Shut them
Open, Shut them
Give a little clap, clap, clap

1. Know HTML? Fine. Forget everything except <, > and /.
2. There are no predefined tags
   (beyond the initial processing instructions which you'll just copy from a template when you need it)
3. Open a tag like this: <TAG>
4. Close the tag like this: </TAG>
5. Case matters
6. Group properly -- <A><B>DATA</B></A>

Now, the truly useful aspects of "XML" have little to do with XML itself. For example, you need to intelligently plan a XSLT for translation and presentation. The W3C DOM is a must for programming. XPATH! SAX... SAX2... oy vey....